Bring out a Mac version and we’ll talk.

Ya think? Look here, cranky (all of Lynch, the person who made this parody and the person who posted it), no one is going to exclusively watch a worthwhile movie on the iPhone. If they do, they are indeed missing out. No one in their right mind does that. When I get an iPhone or an iPod touch, I’m going to have videos, cartoons and maybe even movies on it. Not because I think I’m experiencing the media in the manner the creator intended, but because I’ll be experiencing entertainment on a portable device in a manner I see fit. Quite frankly, with the horrendous drivel coming out of Hollywood these days, I don’t think I’d be missing much watching most movies on a 4″ screen. Either that or there’s some kind of special magic I’ll rob myself of, if I don’t watch Napoleon Dynamite or Borat in a theatre.

Get off your pretentious high horse you arrogant fucks, no one cares what you think. All we care about is having a sexy phones (this goes for any of the new generation phones with those nice, big, bright, gorgeous screens) with the ABILITY to play video. End of story.

Sorry about all that, here’s something to lighten the mood (since it’s so freakin’ awesome). God is a DJ;

As difficult as it is for me to believe, it’s two thousand and eight. That being 2007 years since an arbitrary date picked by a monk called Dionysius Exiguus (or Dennis the Little in the common tongue). Let me quote from Wikipedia to illustrate just how arbitrary our year numbering is;

When he devised his table, Julian calendar years were identified by naming the consuls who held office that year — he himself stated that the “present year” was “the consulship of Probus Junior [Flavius Probus]“, which he also stated was 525 years “since the incarnation [conception] of our Lord Jesus Christ”. How he arrived at that number is unknown.

So he could have, in all probability, simply pulled out a number he thought sounded about right straight out of his cushy monk arse and decreed it year 1, rather than year 0 (which doesn’t actually exist, but would have been much more sensible and useful).

2007 was good.
In terms of things geological; I got my MSc research done, went to Hawai’i to show the world what I’d achieved and launched my geology-themed blog goodSchist around the same time my favourite snowboarding mountain erupted.
In terms of the internet, I got locked into a YouTube battle I should have thought twice about before entering (not because I can’t hold my own, but because very few people online know how to have a fucking scientific debate without resorting to school-yard name calling). I was deeply saddened by the untimely passing of Skeptics’ Guide to the Universe co-host Perry DeAngelis. I also discovered and then proceeded to waste unseemly amounts of time on Facebook - a site I will become more and more dependant on in order to keep in touch with my friends as I branch out into the world.
In terms of my life in general; I joined a gym and lost quite a few kilos before I took off to Hawai’i, but I’m pretty sure they’re all back on now (though they’ll no doubt disappear as I trek through the Aussie outback in the next couple of years). I remained dirt poor throughout what was my last full year as a student. I was instrumental in winning a lawn bowls competition at the beginning of the year, landing me and 7 other geologists with a pallet of beer (that’s 120 dozen, or 1440 individual bottles/cans), which we are still trying to finish. I also met a girl (and that’s all you need to know about that : )

So all in all, a pretty tip top year.

2008 brings us many hopeful prospects. First and foremost, it’s the International Year of the Potato (apparently) and closer to my interests, it’s also the International Year of Planet Earth (about time I reckon). 2008 is also the year I’ll finally hand in my MSc thesis and get my life back on track by starting a career in the mighty world of geology (most probably related to mining up the Australian outback). What started more than 5 years ago with the thought “I should probably get back to getting a degree”, is almost at a close with the thought “I should probably get a damn job”. Before I can make the final steps towards the latter of those thoughts, I need to finish my thesis, so I’ll leave this combined retrospect/prospect post here and get back to writing about magnesium isotopes.

I hope everyone out there has a fun and happy 2008 without putting too much more CO₂ into the air.

Since I’m getting my tickets paid to and from Hawai’i, thanks to travel grants, I’ve also decided to spend a few days bumming around on the beaches on Maui and the Big Island while I’m there. It’d frankly be a waste not to waste time on the beach. Double negatives aside, I’m quite excited I’m getting overseas again. The last time I departed the sweet shores of Aotearoa was back in 2002 on my fourth trip to the UK (a pretty sweet trip, but so many years ago).

Here’s the thing. I’m going to be living cheap. Really cheap. I’m a lowly student with little cash to spend on luxuries like accommodation or washing clothes. That combined with my OCD-like minimalist philosophy mean I’m obsessing with packing as little as possible to survive for the 12 days I’ll be away. Since I’ll be living cheap, I want to take as few valuables as I can deal with, to the extent I’m considering leaving my precious (now fixed) iPod at home and going music-free for almost 2 madness-inducing weeks. At the moment I’m taking as many hole-free pairs of boxers and socks as I can find, combined with a few t-shirts, 3 pairs of shorts and pair of jeans. I may even take a towel, but I’m still debating whether that sensible or not….

I want a single small bag to carry everything, but taking one small carry-on bag on a trip for two weeks will no doubt arouse suspicion with those overly-paranoid goombas at customs. So rather than risking the rubber glove, I’m going to “pack” all my clothes into a bigger backpack, check that through into luggage, and then discard it once I get to Hawai’i, along with my less-liked clothing once they’ve been worn to a point where they’d normally need washing. If I need more clothing I’ll just go to the “WalMart, which I believe is where all the cool kids in the America States get their clothing.

So, now I’ve no doubt set off red flags in the governmental agencies which read blogs, with my talking of buying clothes at WalMart, I’m going to get back to “packing”. I’ll try and keep updates going if I can get to the internets while on the islands.

Woo, that just gave me a huge stroke of déjà vu for some reason. I should get some sleep.

I’ve got a podcast in the works (or, as I’m calling it, a podClast - just to stick with the geology puns). I’ve also got a few articles I’ve been working on for this site, getting closer to a state where I can post them on goodSchist.

So, if you’re interested in geology or science in general, take a look at goodSchist. It’s good shit.

Apple are supposed to be unveiling some new iPod today, though, as luck would have it, so maybe I can save up some extra cash and buy one of those when they come out. Stupid breakable electronics….

Part 1 (48 Minutes from http://video.google.com/)

Part 2 (48 Minutes, from http://video.google.com/)

Neal Adams is a world-famous comic book artist, renowned for his work on the comic books Green Lantern and Batman. He is also a prominent supporter of the expanding earth hypothesis - a hypothesis that was superceded by the theory of plate tectonics more than 40 years ago.

Eccentric artists are fine by me, but when someone comes out and starts making claims that a large portion of science is wrong, offering nothing more than some fancy animations to support such claims, real scientists like me have to step in. Neal Adams not only thinks plate tectonics is wrong, but through our extensive discussions on YouTube (yes, I know, YouTube is the bottom of the barrel), has stated the following beliefs;

• The moon is hollow, rings like a bell
• An Elephant defines the maximum land animal size (tell that to mammoths)
• If elephants walked like other animal with bent legs their bones would snap
• Planets don’t orbit the sun because of gravity, they do so because of the sun’s magnetic field
• The moon is held in orbit by the earth’s magnetic filed
• Mountains have been growing for only the last 50 million years
• The planet increases in size exponentially
• All of Geology supports a growning Earth (none of it does)
• Geology theory says the silicates get DENSER going down (strictly speaking, no)
• A day can’t get longer without Earth getting bigger (the day length relys on the Earth-Moon gravitational system and the angular momentum thereof)
• COLD comes from deep and rises
• Heat does NOT rise
• Earth’s centre of gravity is at the planet’s core
• Magnetic fields travel faster than light
• Rocks that form the Himalayas have always been above the sea
• COMET Schumacher Levi 9 was an asteroid
• Comets don’t fracture.
• Water was and is made in the core of the Earth
• Earth and the other planets did not differentiate
• Elements heavier than iron aren’t made via fusion
• …and many other baseless, stupid claims

To put it lightly, his claims and refusal to accept he’s wrong make my blood boil. So much so that I’ve produced two video replies to him.

These videos are the first of many I hope to make, time and gusto permitting. The first video is Neal’s first expanding earth film and my nit-pick on the details he presented regarding the southern hemisphere.

Neal’s Video:

My response:

There was a very flattering (to me) and damning (to Neal), post over at postpolitical entitled Mud From Space.The article also archives a long discussion series from the YouTube comment thread where I take to task a couple of Neal’s supporters. At times when I post enraged comments directed at some people, I think I’m behaving like a complete dick. But being able to read through a thread as posted previously makes me feel quite a bit better about my angry defence of science.

My second response concerns a second video of Neal’s which claims Pangea couldn’t have existed due to a straw man he built based on an appeal to personal incredulity. I’ve been working on this reply for some time, even before I posted the previous reply. A page summarising my reply can be found here: RE: Neal Adams Pangea

Neal’s Video:

My response:

My efforts will not change Neal’s mind, because from what I can tell, he is unconcerned with evidence counter to his own claims, or listening to people with any experience or expertise. My hope is my efforts will prevent people from subscribing to Neal’s baseless, ridiculous pseudo-science and help encourage scientific enquiry and skepticism in the face of loud, scientific ignorance.

Neal Adams is to geology what Kent Hovind and Ken Ham are to evolution. Completely irrelevant and a good belly laugh for anyone with a clue.

Let me spare you the torturous, septic YouTube comments that resulted and tackle a few points about this video (most comments were anti-muslim, or racist or outrageously retarded regarding the age of some of the commenters).

Firstly, as should be blindingly obvious, this guy doesn’t have a clue about science. There’s no magnetic “zero” zone on earth, because the Earth’s magnetic field flows in a single vector around the planet. Here’s a brief run-down on the magnetosphere from the American Geophysical Union. If you’re in the southern hemisphere, your compass needle still points to the north. The only time it’ll point to the south is during geomagnetic reversal, in which case everyone’s compasses point to the geographic south (which becomes the polar north).
Secondly, the basalts around Mecca are not the oldest rocks in the world, that honour is awarded to zircon crystals from the Jack Hills in Australia. Mecca sits on the Arabian Shield which formed during the late Archean, at ~2500 Ma (at least according to the Saudi Geological Survey). The Jack Hills zircons are ~4100 Ma, so maybe Australia should be Islam’s most holy site? I didn’t think so

The rocks from the temples around Mecca are not made from pre-solar material. The chances that the only major, preserved pre-solar material fall in the world being the material those temples are made from is, excuse the pun, astronomical. Even if it were pre-solar material, there’d be a huge amount of pre-solar material elsewhere on Earth, and I’d probably be studying it.

There is no “infinite” radiation being emitted from Mecca. Infinity doesn’t exist for one thing. Secondly, if this is radiation pointing to heaven, then heaven changes its position every second of every day of every year. We live in a heliocentric solar system, not a geocentric universe.

I have an equally low respect for Islam as I do for all other religions. But I have an even lower respect for people pretending to be scientists (I’ll be taking to Neal in a later post) and others believing the bullshit they spin.

I’m out.

COROT has provided its first image of a giant planet orbiting another star and the first bit of ‘seismic’ information on a far away, Sun-like star, with unexpected accuracy.

The ESA (European Space Agency) satellite COROT (COnvection ROtation and planetary Transits) is designed in part to measure the variations in light waves from stars when an exoplanet transits its stellar parent. This can be summed up simply with the following image from the ESA;

The first planet imaged is a gas giant with a radius 1.78 times that of Jupiter (or 127,255 km), which completes an orbit of its star every 36 hours.

The exceptionally cool thing about these results is the accuracy to which this luminescent variance has been measured. So accurate that imaging a planet the size of the Earth is possible. From the ESA Portal;

The unanticipated level of accuracy of this raw data shows that COROT will be able to see rocky planets - perhaps even as small as Earth - and possibly provide an indication of their chemical composition.

Measuring the variance in the light frequencies is a good way of determining the composition of something as light passes through. This means that determining the make-up of a rocky exoplanet’s atmosphere is perhaps possible with COROT.

COROT could herald a new age of exoplanet discovery, which is awesome. We need a new home.

Spiderman 3 is a horrible, horrible movie. It is worse than Spiderman 1, which I didn’t think much of either. I put S1 on par with Daredevil. It wasn’t wholly awful, there were some entertaining parts, so here’s my positives and negatives:

The Good:

• Bruce Campbell’s performance as a French resterauntuer was simply fantastic. Hilarious in a John Cleese-style motif, Campbell was brilliant in its execution.
• Peter Parker walking down the street thinking he’s the shiz niz, after submitting himself to Venom, was also hilarious.
• Tobey Maguire can play a bad guy very well. He should be type cast as such. His other character acting skills I’ll get to in the bad.
• The action scenes were fantastic to watch. As you’d expect.

The Bad:

• Tobey Maguire can’t act unless he’s playing a complete bastard. As Peter Parker he had one facial expression; benign retardation.
• The movie was about 1 hour too long. Spiderman 3 would have been much better had they shortened or even cut out the scenes relating to the relationships of Peter Parker, Mary-Jane et al.
• There was no explanation for the venom creature. A meteorite landed and it crawled out. Coincidentally in a time and place where the only people around, in New York city mind, were Peter and Mary-Jane. What!? The movie spent 2.5 hours getting to little point, and they couldn’t give any background for the main enemy!?
• A portion of the venom creature was indentified by a physicist as looking like “a chondritic meteorite of the 70s”. No it didn’t, and I know it.
• At the end of the movie, when Spiderman races to save Mary-Jane in the finale battle-royale, he leaps from building to building and moves in front of a giant American flag. What!? This isn’t a moment of patriotism. It’s a man with power racing to save the woman he loves. This is not an action American at its base. I have many american friends, but seriously, if you’d been sitting in the same theatre I was, i.e, one not in the US, the overwhelming mutter at this scene was a whole-hearted “fuck off!”. American patriotism has no place in an international film like Spiderman. Seriously? Fuck off.

And I’ll leave it there. Save your cash, rent the DVD. It’s not worth a cinema ticket to see. And talking of the price of a cinema ticket, Sam Raimi and Sony owe me at least half of my money back.

I give Spiderman 3 a mark of 45%.

Sourced from GoNintendo

Today is Star Wars Day. May the 4th be with you!

At the risk of you, my beloved reader, experiencing a fit of explosive eye-glazing, I will first present a picture of my very first mounted meteorite sample (not as dirty as it sounds);

The white bit in this picture is 4.5672 billion years old. It’s one of the oldest solids in the Solar System and dates back to a time when the Sun was just kicking off its fire-juggling party. The minute concentrations of iron in this rock and the iron in your blood are from the same star-derived reservoir. But I digress.

This is a sample of a Calcium-Aluminium rich Inclusion (or CAI) from a carbonaceous chondrite (stoney-iron meteorites). These things formed in a very hot environment, and the minerals within have gone through between one and three stages of melting. The heat inherent in the environment was not due to the sun, but radioactive decay of unstable isotopes such as 26 Aluminium (Half life of ~703 Ka).

What I’m doing with these tiny inclusions (which are all less than 10mm in diameter), is determining the major mineral constituents, of each of those I’m looking at the minor or trace element concentrations and finally dating them by determining comparative ²⁶Mg deficits (if any). So what involved in each step?

Step 1: Mineralogy: Using an Electron Micro Probe, I am able to determine the major elemental weight percentages of each mineral “phase” of the targeted CAI;

Each shade of grey in the above image is a different mineral. In this case, the lightest phase (Phase 1, points of sampling are orange) is melilite, the second lightest (Phase 2, coloured blue) is pyroxene, phase 3 (in green) is anorthite, and the nearly black phase 4 (in red) is spinel. The above image is an electron back-scatter image of a Type B1 CAI from the carboneceous chondrite NWA 2364.

Step 2: Trace Elements: Using Laser Ablation Inductively-Coupled Plasma Mass Spectrometry (LA-ICP-MS), I am determining the concentrations of 34 chemical elements that are present to an accuracy of a few parts per million (ppm) or less. The elements I’m looking for range through Uranium, Thorium, Lead, Titanium, the Rare Earth Elements (REE) and more. By comparing the concentrations of these elements in different CAIs, whole meteorites and planets, you can get an idea of what was around when each formed and how the areas of formation differed in their respective elemental composition. Did the Earth and these CAIs form in the same place in the solar nebula? The answer at the moment is no, so why did the solar nebula cloud have differing concentrations of elements from one point to another? That’s the big questions relating to how these various bodies formed.

I like to think of this step as a real life game of Asteroids, with a scientific slant.

Step 3: Magnesium Deficits and Dating: Using another kind of ICPMS, namely a Multi-Collector, I will be determining the concentrations of the isotopes of magnesium (Mg) in each of my collected samples. As I mentioned previously, these samples were heated by the decay of ²⁶Al. This particular isotope decays to ²⁶Mg. So the more ²⁶Mg in a sample, the older it is. Any deficit in ²⁶Mg compared to that of the maximum found in CAIs can be correlated to the time between CAI formation and the formation of whatever you’re looking at. So by getting the ²⁶Mg/²⁴Mg ratio from these samples, I can determine their relative ages from oldest to youngest. This is of interest because knowing over what time span CAIs were forming can help you determine whether it all happened at once in a very short time span (and was thus stopped by some process of the sun’s formation), whether there were several exclusive periods of CAI formation (perhaps by injection of ²⁶Al from nearby supernovae), or whether it happened slowly and steadily over 6 half lives of ²⁶Al (most likely).

Why does this count as geology? By knowing what was around when the Earth formed and thus what it is made of (i.e, how the chemical composition of the solar nebula changed over time) and how old it is in comparison to other bodies in the solar system, you can build more accurate models of the chemical composition of the materials that make up the crust, mantle and the core of the Earth. This helps in the understanding of how and why things are the way they are. It also makes up the underpinning of mantle geochemistry, volcanic petrology and chemistry, and environmental and atmospheric evolution (which links to the formation of life (abiogenesis) and the like.

So that’s what I’m spending most of my time doing. Any questions, just post a comment and I’ll endeavour to answer.

• Get my drivers license - I have my restricted license, now I have to sit my full (NZ has weird driving license rules)
• Cut down on drinking - I barely had a chance to drink last year

And these are the things I did half-arsed or didn’t manage;

• Pick up my grades at uni - to be fair I did improve in the second trimester compared to the first. I’m deep into my research now, so I’m through.
• Eat better and lose some weight (10Kg) - I’ve not lost weight, although I’ve not tried.
• Get more sleep - Didn’t happen either. I need to get this sorted out.
• Get some decent exercise done - maybe join a gym - I did Kung Fu for a while and it was fun until I started injuring myself every time. I blame my weight for this.

So that leaves me with this years resolutions. I’m not going to suggest proposals as grand as PZ Myers (those are some fantastic wishes, BTW), as I need to keep things reasonable, so here are some of my goals in two thousand and seven;

• Get my research and thesis done within the calendar year. I don’t want to be at school much longer as I’m sick and tired of the poverty.
• Lose weight, eat well, exercise and get more sleep. The usual better living goal. Let’s see if I can manage it this year
• Be nicer to people. Seriously, I’ve been becoming a real cunt in recent years. I’m being a dick simply to get attention. My people-hating hassle-others-as-self-defence scheme has to change or I’m going to lose a lot of friends
• Continue in simplifying my life by reducing the things I own. I’ve been over possessions for quite some time and I still have a lot of things I need to get rid of, or find convergent solutions for

That’ll do for now. Sleep time.